The Elder Scrolls (commonly referred to as TES) is an award-winning series of roleplaying games created by Bethesda Softworks. Set in the vast world of Tamriel, The Elder Scrolls series is renowned for the level of unprecedented control given the player over his or her character's destiny, establishing itself as the benchmark in immersive, independently-living worlds for the RPG genre.

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How to play an authentic, non-exploiting pure spellcaster in Morrowind? (Read the Morrowind section. To see what I mean with "authentic", read everything.)

I guess there will be a lot of spoilers here... From Arena to Skyrim. So yeah, be advised.

Arena: This one was really easy. All you needed was shield and absorb spell. And a decent list of damaging spells. Once you cast shield it was actually permanent, it had "hit points". So it was just a barrier that enemies had to get through to hurt you. You just had to cast this when the the enemies started hurting and you were free of troubles. Absorb spell was useful when you fought other spellcasters. It made everything easy once you were level 10 or so, because it was easy to make a spell that had 100% absorb spell effect. The enemies just kept refilling your spell points that way! You didn't even need to rest to get them back. So easy. And awesome. And you're not even exploiting the game that way!

Daggerfall: That one was a bit tougher than Arena. What I did was following. I leveled my destruction to 90+ and then enchanted a piece of clothing/jewelry with destruction skill enhancing. That way, you had your destruction over 100. All the destruction spells then cost 5 spell points, which is almost nothing with 300 spell points available. The other way was to enchant pieces of clothing so you had absorb spell. You just cast an area effect spell and that way you damaged your enemies and reabsorbed the spell. I didn't like doing that last thing though, felt too much like exploiting, although other people might say it's not.

Morrowind: For some reason I never managed to make a character that would be a cool, "authentic" spell caster. You could enchant a number of rings with fire damage, or something and just use them to machinegun everything, but that's not what I'm asking for. For those who didn't play Morrowind: Enchanted items regenerate their charge over time by themselves. You don't have to recharge them yourself. So if you had a number of rings that did fire damage, you just switched to another ring when the first was depleted. And then to the third, and so on. If you had enough rings, the first one had already recharged itself by the time you used all your rings, so you could just use the first one again. As I was saying, this is not what I'm looking for, feels kind of like exploiting. Is it even possible to make a good mage without enchanting? I feel like if I have to use enchanting again, I'll just exploit it again too, so...

Oblivion: Contrary to some people's opinion, this one was easy too. You just had to have some brains. And no, you didn't have to exploit alchemy for it. You didn't have to use it at all. I see a lot of people saying: "make fortify magicka and fortify intelligence potions!" What the hell? Who wants to always carry around 30+ fortifying potions? Not me. There's a much easier way to dish out 1000+ damage with a few spells. And only Apprentice/Journeyman in destruction.

You just had to make 2 custom spells. First one is weakness to magic 100% for 7 seconds. The other is weakness to shock (or other elemental) 100% coupled with weakness to magic 100% for 7 seconds. In that order. You might be wondering why 2 spells? Wait for it. You cast the first spell on you enemy. For the next 7 seconds, all your damaging spells will do 2x damage. But wait for it. If you cast the 1st spell again, the multiplier will double(or just add?) AND the duration will reset! So you just keep casting this spell if you want crazy amounts of damage. Once or twice is enough though. Then you cast the second spell. The reason you don't just cast the second spell is because the duration of weakness to elemental damage doesn't reset and 7 seconds just isn't a lot. After you cast the 2nd spell, you just use an elemental damaging spell. With those crazy multipliers added by the 1st and 2nd spell, am apprentice damaging spell will dish out crazy amounts of damage. For best effect use a 2 seconds lasting damaging elemental spell and cast it twice if needed. My recommendation. Oh, you might be wondering why use these spells? They are A LOT more magicka effective. You can pretty much keep casting these for quite a while with good stats.

Skyrim: They ditched a lot of spellcasting features from TES in Skyrim, but they made it look so amazingly good I wasn't even mad. Not much tricks here though. Just pretty much straightforward damage dealing. 100 enchanting skill made it possible to make fortify destruction clothes with which your magicka didn't deplete at all, when using destrucion magic. Meh, to exploit-y for me. I just played a mage-ssassin. I usually walked around invisible and muffled. With silent casting perk (illusion) and good sneak skill, the enemies barely noticed you when you cast lighting and killed someone with it. Made it easy to make a silent-pure-caster killer. Awesome for dark brotherhood. Also, did I mention how awesome it looks when you double-cast a spell?

Battlespire: I'm mentioning this one in the end, because it's more like a bonus. It wasn't like the rest of the TES series, because it wasn't open-world. I'll be honest here. I couldn't play a pure caster at all. Is it even possible?

EDIT: I also just realized that most of you probably haven't played more than 2 or 3 titles. Just post your spellcaster experience in the games that you have played.

I'm curious... How do you define the line between an exploit vs a non-exploit? I never really played anything but Skyrim far enough to get into the nuance of magic, and I have to say, Oblivion sounds like a lot of fun. So as far as exploits go, the biggest one I'd say exists for enchanting in Skyrim is the fortify restoration potion exploit. As long as you don't use that it's all fair game.

I have to admit... The line is quite blurry. It's pretty much a feeling you get while playing. It's the point in the game when you feel like: "Gosh, I don't think this is what the developers meant when they put xyz in the game!" Sometimes things are intentionally left in the game... So you can have fun with them. And sometimes, you just realize that if you continue playing like that, it's all going to be boring because it has become too easy. And then you realize it has become easy because you probably exploited something. Sorry if it's a weird answer... But it's difficult to draw a line, because the games are all so different.

I see where your coming from. When I first played Gta: san andreas as a kid, I learned all the cheat codes and used them all the time. I recently got back into it on the PC and playing without cheat codes has been a much more rewarding experience.

I'd say that the developers were well aware of the fact that you can nullify magical spell costs by maxing enchant.

I say this because they put certain caps on other enchantments, but not magical cost reductions. For instance, resistance effects cap out at about 85%. That's deliberate coding to stop the effect from becoming too powerful. They would have done the same for cost reductions if they didn't want people to have 0-cost spells.

Morrowind: I played a Breton with the atronach sign. I focused on mysticism, alteration, and alchemy. I made one hard hitting destruction spell that I named "hand of death" which was essentially absorb hella (I forget the actual points, it was silly high though) life on touch. One or two touches was all it ever took. Coupled with Chamelon or even invisibility and some clothes to boost speed and I actually never had a problem except for early on, but I have always had a hell of a time in the beginning of Morrowind.
I think I need to pull out my xbox and look her up now...

edit: as pointed out my "destruction" spell was actuall a mysticism spell. Sorry bout that slip.

Absorb health is a mysticism spell in Morrowind... So I see why you focused on it. Maybe I could use absorb magicka (which is mysticism too) to replenish the reserves? The cost of casting such a spell would probably be higher than the magicka absorbed though...

Only one I played a pure spellcaster in was Oblivion. Went heavy into Restoration, and Conjuration, with a bit of destruction when I got bored.

Summon Astronach, then get enemies to focus it while healing it up, combined with destruction to help out with enemy mages/ranged targets. Worked well enough, and only real custom spells needed were better destruction ones and a 1sec paralyze spell.

In Morrowind while I never played a pure caster I found that playing as a breton with the atronach sign gave me enough magika to do pretty much whatever I wanted. Between fights just summon an atronach and attack it and let its spells replenish your magika since it wont recharge from resting.

having a few potion of restore magika in your inventory isnt a bad idea either.

Without mods your best bet is to go Breton with atronach for the spell absorption and just chug potions to restore your magicka (as opposed to resting for other birthsigns) You can exploit drain intelligence (if you drain intelligence to 0 your magicka resets to full, so, drain INT for 100 pts for 1 second gives you full magicka after 1 second) You basically will want to use a similar spell rotation as skyrim though, exploiting specific racial/other weaknesses as well (fire against vampires for example) Use the weakness->damage rotation, also you need a solid summon skill, a battle buddy gives you so much more power combined with a decent paralyze spell

You can supplement your arsenal a bit with rings, but you can just exploit the machine gunning as you mentioned. Try supplementing with just rings that have passive beneficial effects (levitate, water walking, water breathing, shield, resist magic, restore hp/fatigue) rather than offensive so as to not exploit too much.

The reason you go Breton is because the magic resist helps you 1000 times more than the extra magicka from going high elf (and the added weaknesses you'd be stuck with). Spells required: a couple different summons as your conjuration grows stronger (ancestral ghost, bonewalker maybe, golden saint/dremora), paralyze spell (so fantastic and awesome, does great against anyone except vampires, paralyze to get off what you need to do), couple different damage spells, fire and frost are cheaper than shock, you need to play the racial weaknesses/bonus resists as much as possible. Then chug potions as necessary. To avoid exploiting, make your gear like Oblivion's, staves are for damage on target spells, the things you wear are for self buffs.

When I played a pure caster in Skyrim it was a 100 hour game save and I never used a dragon shout besides Unrelenting Force first word. They did a great job with functionality and usability with mages on there. But I weep at how much has been dropped from the magic system since Morrowind. Honestly its all content, not just spells.